The City on the Hill

With the release of the "torture memos", two debates have begun spreading across America. The first is whether the actions by the CIA and other agents acting on behalf of the United States Government should be considered torture. This debate has many legal ramifications and will greatly affect future intelligence gaining operations. It will likely be settled in the judiciary after many long precedings. There are many questions about what constitutes torture and how close we should come to that distinction. Even though this debate has it's share of demagogues and partisan hacks on either side that are more concerned with scoring political points then the truth, it is still a debate that must be had.

Unfortunately, there is another debate that threatens to do even greater harm to what's left of the remnants of America's ideals. The new question that is increasingly being posed is if it is ever alright for the American government to torture. The answer is and should always be emphatically no. It does not matter if these "enemy combatants" are not American citizens or don't fall under the Geneva Conventions. We are America, the shining beacon, the city on the hill, and we should never torture. A human life, no matter how terrible, is still a human life and, at the very least, should be respected. No matter how angry we are for what was done, or how much we hope to prevent by our actions, it is never acceptable to cross that line. We are not our enemies. If we have fallen so far as to question whether we can tolerate torture then it is likely that we have crossed the line past being redeemable.

Furthermore, if supposedly the nation with the best military, technology, and intelligence gathering in the world cannot use the means that it already has (many of them crossing various bounds as well), then how will torturing someone change that? The question is often posed as: "Should the government torture someone if it save 1,000 lives?" Who then should the government have tortured to prevent 9/11 or the first WTC attacks? What do we have left to say that the government cannot do? Another argument is that there are still more memos that prove the effectiveness of these techniques. If any technique is determined to be torture, then that should not even come into play. There is no doubt that when Saddam attacked the Kurds, there were some that had plans against his life. What he did was still wrong. Is that really what we want to become?

America's War on Everything

Nothing feeds the leviathan quite as well as a good crisis, or even better yet a war. This has been true since the founding of the country when Adams used the quasi-war with France as justification for the Alien and Sedition acts. It was FDR that officially drove the point home. He used the Great Depression and World War II to force a litany of unconstitutional and illegal measures down the throats of the American people. From interning American citizens to his wide array of ABC programs, there was little that he felt he could not justify to deal with these crises. From a big government standpoint, the only problem with these crises and wars was that they were finite. Once they ended the American people tended to remember what it was like to not jump at their own shadows and would sometimes question the size that the government has grown to in order to "save" them. It wasn't until LBJ and his "Great Society" that such trivialities no longer became an issue and America began declaring war on things. Things that have always existed, and will always continue to exist, thus creating a perpetual need for "war".

LBJ started this new trend with the War on Poverty. With this, the government was going to swoop in and solve everybody's problems, and it did not matter how long it took or what rights and liberties got trampled along the way. Taxes went up, wealth was "redistributed", and a wide array of programs that the government could never actually pay for were started. States rights were eroded in the name of the Federal Government ensuring that everyone got a fair shake. Never mind that few of these programs actually do anything to help the truly impoverished, or the millions and billions of dollars that disappear into the void of Federal bureaucracy. This is war we are fighting, and it is all for our own good. The only draw back of this war is its lack of a defined enemy for the American people to want to stand against.

The next eternal war was the War on Drugs. Now the government has an enemy for us to focus our attention on: druggies, dealers, and the producers. Through the drug war the government has simultaneously been able to increase the police state and our external war machine. Federal agencies need more and more funding, and are more able to override states rights and wishes because only they can deal with the problem and they know what is best. Minimum sentencing is the new way to deal with all dopers and drug fiends. Countries like Columbia regularly get fire bombed so that we can "wipe out" their production fields. Even now Obama is trying to use the drug war to curtail second amendment rights to protect us from the cartels. Now the problem is that American's aren't universally afraid of drugs. In fact most Americans are on one form of drug or another every single day.

With its newest war, the government has finally been able to produce its perfect fertilizer: the War on Terror. Now the Federal Government had its Emmanuel Goldstein. Terrorists are universally feared and reviled, and the public is willing to give up almost anything to stop them. Any constitutional right may be trampled. Any action by the government is acceptable: warrantless wire traps, torture, military adventurism, and anything else that they can think up. Entire new departments, like the Department of Homeland Security, are created and bills with names like the Patriot Act are passed. Every thing is very patriotic and if you are not behind this massive power grab then you must want America to fail! As long as the trade off is that someone will tuck us in at night and make sure our night-light is on, then the government can do whatever is "needed". Never you mind that the government is already training its eye on domestic groups that it doesn't agree with. This cause is necessary and righteous!

It's doubtful that even with these three "wars" the government will come to wield all of the power that it wants. Finite crises still play a big role (see:financial meltdown) and will still be used to enact more statist laws and ideals. There will also be even more "wars" in the future (War on Piracy?) that will fuel the governments constant expansion. The crises are the acute growth and the wars are chronic. All we the people can do is stay watchful and weary of any new "wars". No matter how much we feel that something should be fixed or removed, we have to remember that it is not always (or nearly ever) the Federal Government's job to wage War against it.